No world premieres at this year’s BFI London Film Festival? Never mind,
there’s still plenty to get excited about.

The BFI London Film Festival (LFF) is known as a “festival of festivals”, which is a nice way of saying there’s never anything new in it. In fairness, the LFF was never intended to be a cutting-edge event – it was founded in 1956 with the express aim of showcasing the best titles from other European festivals, such as Cannes and Venice.

But its record for screening important films first is unlikely to sink any lower than in this, its 55th year: among the 16 gala and special screenings, the world premieres number zero.

Is this a problem? Not really, unless you’re the type of self-important whiner who can’t have a good time unless they’re having it before everybody else in the world (unfortunately most film critics fall into this demographic).

Normal festival-goers tend to be happy enough to watch a well-chosen selection of films in like-minded company, unbothered by iPhones and chewing. And besides, even if the movies themselves have already been seen elsewhere, some of them now come saddled with an emotional baggage that’s uniquely and distinctively British.

Take the Fernando Meirelles-directed ensemble drama 360, which will screen as the LFF’s opening night gala. The film (pronounced “Three-sixty”) received wildly mixed reviews when it premiered in Toronto last month. One British critic described it as “a two-hour slog”. Sandra Hebron, the LFF’s artistic director, has since branded the review “idiotic”. That’s one advantage of showing films before anyone else: nobody’s in a position to say “it’s a bit rubbish” beforehand.

Meirelles, who also directed City Of God and The Constant Gardener, is an accomplished visual storyteller, and 360’s writer, Peter Morgan, is an established talent. But tantalisingly, they both come to 360 on the back of a flop – Meirelles for his ludicrous art-horror Blindness and Morgan from the hokey supernatural drama Hereafter. Personally, I can’t wait to see it, if only to find out what’s inspired the disagreements.

Notably less controversial is the closing night gala, Terence Davies’s adaptation of the Terence Rattigan play The Deep Blue Sea, starring Rachel Weisz. In the centenary of Rattigan’s birth, which has seen so much of his work receive a welcome and revelatory revival, there could hardly be a better-chosen way to bring the festival to a close. Four other gala screenings stand out. Firstly The Descendants, a bittersweet comedy starring George Clooney and helmed by Alexander Payne, the director of Sideways – much more appealing than Clooney’s own directorial effort also screening at LFF, the cloyingly well-intentioned political noir The Ides of March.

There’s also the loopy Jacobean conspiracy romp Anonymous. The film, which suggests Shakespeare was not the author of his plays, is not being advertised as the work of “the guy who brought you Independence Day”, even though the two films share a director, Roland Emmerich. Don’t let that put you off: it’s a gripping, gleefully grimy pleasure.

Shakespeare gets equally eccentric treatment from Ralph Fiennes in Coriolanus. The actor’s directorial debut relocates the tragedy to a war-torn modern Balkan state, and features battle scenes shot by the director of photography on The Hurt Locker; a perma‑bellowing Gerard Butler; and an apparently spectacular turn from Vanessa Redgrave as the Roman leader’s mother, Volumnia.

Andrea Arnold’s offbeat take on Wuthering Heights has already stockpiled approving poster quotes from its outings at Venice and Toronto, but I’m more interested in Michael Winterbottom’s ingenious reworking of Tess of the D’Urbervilles.

Trishna, starring Freida Pinto and Riz Ahmed, relocates Hardy’s much-adapted novel to present-day India, with Rajasthan and Mumbai both standing in for rural Wessex. Winterbottom’s no newcomer to Hardy, either: he’s previously adapted Jude the Obscure and reshaped The Mayor of Casterbridge into The Claim.

And then there’s The Artist, a silent, black-and-white love letter to cinema set in Twenties Hollywood, directed by silent cinema enthusiast Michel Hazanavicius. Early reviews have stopped only just short of saying the film maketh the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, so book early. Other gala screenings include A Dangerous Method, David Cronenberg’s psychosexual spanking drama which happens to be about Freud and Jung and their arguments over the treatment of a patient (Keira Knightley); artist Steve McQueen’s Shame, which stars Michael Fassbender as a despairing sex addict; We Need to Talk About Kevin, Lynne Ramsay’s first feature in nine years; the Dardenne brothers’ The Kid With a Bike and of course W.E., un film de Madonna.

Deeper in the programme, I can recommend 50/50, a wry and bracingly honest comedy about a twentysomething radio producer (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) who’s diagnosed with cancer, The Awakening, a superior haunted-house tale with a captivating performance from Rebecca Hall, and Martha Marcy May Marlene, an eerie, provocative and beautifully fragile drama about a teenage girl (Elizabeth Olsen) extracting herself from a cult.

I’m also looking forward to seeing I Wish; Into the Abyss: a Tale of Death, a Tale of Life; and Alps, the new films from Hirokazu Kore-eda, Werner Herzog and Yorgos Lanthimos – although perhaps not quite as much as the beautiful new animation from Japan’s Makoto Shinkai, which has been blessed with the title Children Who Chase Lost Voices From Deep Below.

On balance, then? It’s a damn good line-up. Almost good enough to make you forget that a handful of cravat‑wearing Europeans have already seen most of it.